A 'Harlequin' fiddle

[Alan Carruth]

With things pretty quiet last year I took the opportunity to work on a project I'd been meaning to make for years, a 'Harlequin' fiddle made of different colored woods. I have found over time that Black Walnut is reasonably similar to soft maple, and Western red cedar can substitute for spruce. By making alternate parts of the two woods you can end up with a pretty colorful instrument.

The maple in this was cut by Carleen Hutchins here in New Hampshire back in 1988. The spruce half of the top is a piece that was salvaged from the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge when that was renovated, some decades ago. It is Red spruce, that was cut on Mt. Ascutney in 1869. The walnut and Red cedar came from the lumber yard. The fingerboard has a core of persimmon wood from Tennessee, with a thick veneer on the surface of black dyed persimmon with soft shell almond wood for the lighter stock, and maple stringer and binding. The pegs are also persimmon, stained dark, and sap wood dogwood salvaged from a small tree that was felled in an ice storm.

When I first thought of this I drew up a wonderful little clown head, but with the passage of time and a move it has been pretty thoroughly misplaced. It took a while to come up with a new one. As it turns out, the original commedia del'arte Harlequin was a black face performer, and I certainly did not want to go there. Given the general tenor of the news I thought it would be nice to have something that was pretty much just 'happy', and I hope I caught some of that. The head is a maple graft onto a walnut neck (reinforced with a CF rod, just in case), and the dark areas of the beard and hat are a walnut hull tea stain. The bells and gold balls are brass flocking in the varnish. I used Murdoch's 'Ure-Alkyd 500' varnish, very thin.

I did not get many pictures of it. It is currently being played by a friend, and I should be able to get a few more shots over time.

For those interested in the 'technical' stuff, for the moment I'll just say that the lower density if the cedar was the only thing that seemed to make any difference. I left that side of the top thicker to suit. It has a spruce bass bar. I can post mode shapes and such if anybody is interested.

[Bob Gramann]

That is just beautiful! Congratulations.

[Bryan Bear]

Nicely done. I really like the pegbox carving! I wish I had that skill!

I had no woodworking experience and my first instrument was a long neck dulcimer that was basically me trying to learn to use tools. Somehow it ended up as a playable, but deeply flawed, instrument. It had a “scroll” on the pegbox where I was practicing using files. A friend saw the instrument and asked if I could make him one. Then he asked if, instead of a scroll, I would carve Leonardo Da Vinci’s head. I said sure, do you also want it to fly?

That is a long way for me to go just to say that I’m impressed enough by making a violin and your theme and carving get an additional level of respect.

[Jim McConkey]

Wow!

[Bob Ionta]

Very cool Alan!

[Marshall Dixon]

Wonderful! A work of art. Put a smile on my face.

[Ken Nagy]

Cool! I thought I pushed boundaries. I have a couple oddballs to finish and string up. I don't play, but they all sound like violins. I think archimgs, wood characteristics, thicknesses, weght, and everything else makes more of a difference than species. But tradition?
They are trying to get rid of tradition.

[Bob Francis]

Awesome work!

[Barry Daniels]

I like the way the tuning pegs represent the limbs of the figure.

[Dick Hutchings]

Would I love to be playing something like that! OMG, beautiful.

[Karl Wicklund]

Alan, I like this very much. You definitely put joy in the clown's face.
Is there historical precedent for a Harlequin fiddle, or is this your own design and own term.

[Alan Carruth]

There are lots of string instruments of all sorts adorned with carvings. Some of them get pretty salacious. I've seen a number of fiddles with heads said to depict various people, lion's heads, and so on. The viola d'amore tends to have a blindfold Venus head, for example. The real departure in this one is the use of different species of wood within the top and back plates; usually each plate is made of one sort of wood. It's not unusual to see woods other than the canonical European maple and spruce, but not to mix them up in this way. I'm not saying it's never been done, mind you, but I've never seen it.

As I said, soft maple and black walnut have very similar mechanical and acoustic properties, so they ought to be compatible. Once you think of the two together the Harlequin, with his parti-colored suit, suggests itself immediately. The trick then is to find a piece of dark softwood to match the spruce, more or less. Since softwood properties track the density pretty well across species, it's actually not so hard to do.

The outline of the fiddle itself is my own, although you'd probably be hard put to distinguish it from a Strad. The rest follows standard practice, as I understand it.

Barry Daniels wrote:
"I like the way the tuning pegs represent the limbs of the figure."

I didn't think of that! Maybe I should make new pegs with hands and feet....

The initial concept was a lot fancier than this. One thing I had planned was the use of diamond purfling, with dark diamonds in a white background and b/w purfling on the light side, and vice versa. I sat down one day and figured out how many diamonds I'd have to cut, looked at the time I had to work on it. and said: "Nah!".

[Paul Breen]

Playful and very, very nice Alan. Are you planning on making a bow to match?

[Darrel Friesen]

Just Wow! That's excellent Alan. Reminds me of something you or Howard Klepper would do. Very inspiring.

[Alan Carruth]

I have made very few bows, and making a 'Harlequin' one would be a challenge, especially if you wanted to restrict it to domestic woods. I think I'll pass for the moment....

[Clay Schaeffer]

Hi Alan,
Cool looking fiddle!
One way to make a lot of small diamonds is similar to cutting small pieces of onion - first cross hatch the material (wood or Corian or similar) and then slice off the thickness you want.

[Alan Carruth]

That was the plan, with maple diamonds and walnut half-diamonds for the dark sides, and the opposite on the light sides. The diamonds would have been small, so it would take a lot of them, and it was just too much time.

Some years back I made a 'show' guitar with little side grain maple leaves inlaid around the top and rosette. The tiles are 3.5 mm square, and there are 20 pieces per tile; the smallest piece is .7 mm square and cut on a diagonal to the grain. It took 95 hours to make the leaves, using plane jigs. The guitar itself is Brazilian rosewood, and I could not take it to the Montreal Guitar Festival, since it could have been confiscated at the border: I could not show my 'show' guitar. I could make another out of domestic wood, but I just can't face another 95 hours of making leaves....

[Patrick Hanna]

I like it!

[Teresa Wiggins]

It's so beautiful and unique.